Brace yourself for the self-driving paradigm shift

Hands-free in the self-driving Kia Soul EV.

Handout, Kia

For better or worse, autonomous cars promise to change everything

by
David Booth | February 17, 2016

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The automotive industry can often feel like a zero-sum game. Gas prices go down, automakers sell more trucks and big sedans. Sales of hybrids and other electric vehicles, on the other hand, tank. All those trucks sold fatten corporate coffers. But they also make the task of meeting various governments’ fuel economy and emissions regulations — President Obama’s 54.5 miles per gallon mandate, the EU’s even more stringent 94 g/km CO2 requirement — much more problematic. Automakers, in that same quest for fuel conservation, embrace aluminum and other weight-reduction materials. The steel industry — #steelmatters — afraid it is losing its biggest customer, fights back, claiming that aluminum’s overall emissions reductions are illusory. The auto industry, as cutthroat competitive as any other, has its winners and its losers.

But, those contretemps are just statistical noise compared with the revolution that self-driving cars promise. Unless you’re a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club or have gone long on ArcelorMittal, the amount of carbon dioxide your tailpipe emits or the amount of aluminum making up your rear suspension arms pales in comparison to what the autonomous automobile promises — unparalleled convenience, tailpipe emissions dramatically reduced and, in the rosiest of all predictions, the almost complete eradication of the automobile accident. It would seem, at first blush at least, an automotive utopia.

Indeed, most of the arguments against autonomous driving — inevitable with such dramatic change in something so central to our way of life — focus on a few arcane ethical points and the Orwellian worry future governments will determine that, in comparison to computers, we humans are too frail to be allowed to drive our own cars. Hardly trivial, such philosophical restlessness nonetheless pales in comparison to more immediate and concrete changes this paradigm shift will bring.

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Uber isn’t trying to put taxi companies out of business; it’s trying to put humans out of work. Lost in all the hubbub of Uber’s war on the taxi cab establishment is that the Silicon Valley darling’s end goal is to completely eliminate the human behind the wheel. According to the New York Times, Uber has decimated Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Laboratory, purloining many of its software and robotics engineers. CEO Travis Kalanick would seem more bullish on the completely autonomous, driverless automobile than even Google, noting that drivers are the company’s biggest expense. “The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car — you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” Kalanick said at a conference in 2014. “When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle.”

He’s not alone: Los Angeles taxi commissioner Eric Spiegelman, also a proponent of the human-free cab, noted at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show that a completely autonomous taxi might cost as little as US$0.25 a mile compared with the current $2.70/mi fare basis; less, in fact, than the cost of bus fare. Of course, that also might put cabbies (some 235,000 in the U.S. alone) out of work. And why stop there? If a car can be automated, so, too, can an 18-wheeler. Who needs a truck driver when C3PO can do a better job for less? These are just a few of the five million jobs the World Economic Forum estimates will disappear thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence. Yet, drivers are still flocking to work for Uber. Creative destruction has always been part and parcel of economic revolution, but seldom has it been ushered in by the very people whose jobs it seeks to destroy.

An Uber driver sits in his car parked near the San Francisco International Airport parking area in San Francisco, Wednesday, July 15, 2015.

New profit centres will emerge. The route to profits in the automotive industry has never been so simple: Build the basic bones of a car so you at least break even, and then build your margins on all the luxury accoutrements consumers ultimately spoil themselves with. Turbocharge an even more powerful engine or add yet another subwoofer to an already ear-splitting audio system and your shareholders will love you. More than ever it is hardware — the more hedonistic, the better — that rules corporate coffers.

That is about to change, says Thilo Koslowski, vice-president of Gartner, a leading technology research firm. Koslowski claims that by 2020 automakers will generate about 20 per cent of their profits from simple over-the-air software updates. The groundwork has already being laid; Elon Musk already boasting the competitive advantage of upgrading his Model Ss over the air. Indeed, Tesla’s vaunted AutoPilot self-driving system was piped to existing owners remotely. Like so many software updates, I suspect the first upgrades will be free. But I would not count on that continuing. The auto industry is quickly learning Silicon Valley’s tricks.

Google versus Ford. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show was also rife with the Yahoo-fueled rumour that Ford and Google would be pairing up in a game-changing union of self-driving and car manufacturing giants. In fact, the opposite proved true. There might be an insipient war — or, at least, some very healthy competition — brewing between Silicon Valley and Motor City. Lost in the disappointment of the proposed Google/Ford hookup was the news that Ford has developed a SmartDeviceLink open-source smartphone app software platform to develop its own in-car navigation and entertainment systems, competing directly with CarPlay and Android Auto. Wary of making the same type of mistake IBM did in ceding control of its software to Microsoft, Ford CEO Mark Fields is obviously not willing to leave all the profit-generating data collection to Apple and Google. Toyota has already signed on to use Ford’s development program and Honda, Mazda and Subaru are reportedly contemplating the adoption of it as well. And, let’s be frank here; if car companies are unwilling to get in bed with the eggheads on something as basic as the infotainment system, expect even less cooperation when it comes to producing a complete (self-driving) automobile.

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More traffic congestion, not less? Part of the utopian promise of the fully autonomous car is less traffic congestion. That promise is premised on the simple principle there will be fewer cars on the road. For instance, families with only one breadwinner can dispense with their second car, their self-driving car fully capable of returning home on its own for daytime driving duties. There will also be fewer cars on the road because taxicabs, suddenly cheaper than the aforementioned public transport, eliminate the need for private automobile ownership. Why own a depreciating asset that you don’t use 95 per cent of the time, especially if said investment is the second-largest cash outlay most consumers make?

That is the theory. Throwing a monkey wrench in that congestion-free utopian future is that millennials, once thought to be resolutely urban, are flocking to lower-cost suburbia with the same verve boomers once did. And the autonomous car may promote said suburban sprawl. The greatest detriment to the daily commute is not so much the time spent as the time wasted. The fully autonomous car promises to make crawling to work the most productive — or at least entertaining — part of your day. No longer do you need to operate brake and steering wheel; your entire sojourn can now be spent telecommuting or playing Angry Birds. Suddenly, Markham or Burnaby do not seem so very far away.

Judging by the response from consumers and automakers alike, the allure of cars that will drive themselves is seemingly impossible to resist. Safety and convenience are huge drivers in the automotive industry. Computer-controlled, self-driving cars offer both, but at what price?

A dialogue between drivers takes place on our roads, and it’s often caustic and fraught with anger